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KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (2005) Starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, Edward Norton, Martin Csokas, Brendan Gleeson, Alexander Siddig.

Directed by Ridley Scott.

Running time: 145 minutes.

Rating: R

The title of this could also be how to become a knight in five minutes because that is roughly how long it takes for Orlando Bloom's Balian character to go from highstrung blacksmith to the ultimate warrior. His long-lost father (Neeson) and his men teach him how to fight in only a few minutes of screentime then his father spends a little bit longer trying to teach him to have a moral code.

Legal trouble back home for Balian makes fighting in the crusades seem like a good idea. He can lay low whilst getting shot at by archers in Jerusalem and hope the criminal charges he faces will just blow over.

Balian is courageous, noble, inspirational and a born leader who believes in the code of chivalry and nobility more than he believes in anything else. In other words he is the perfect guy to get a lot of people killed for no good reason.

Of course what helps are the powerhungry psychos as portrayed by Marton Csokas and Brendan Gleeson who go around picking fights with the Muslim armies of Saladin, perhaps the greatest military general of Musilim forces ever.

Machiavelli wrote THE PRINCE sometime after this and you can see why there would be a need for a kind of book like that. Balian has a such a bloodyminded, black and white view of the world that he can't make the one decision which would not only save thousands of lives but give him his one shot at happiness.

The cast is terrific, the locations and costuming beautiful but the implausibility of the main character, who for all the potential he shows really is just a glorified idiot that will never understand the complexities of statecraft limits what a great movie this could have been.

Learn more about this author, Jason Daniel Baker.
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